I only own the Mom character. The turtles one, not April's.

"I thought she was crazy. That's a terrible way to begin a remembrance of the woman you love, but it's true. I thought she was crazy, and I could help."

"She believed her missing family members had been taken by aliens inside of robots. I convinced her over many sessions she was misremembering a real tragedy. Humans, not robots or aliens, but perhaps humans in costumes using some kind of mechanical devices and perhaps lazars had hunted down her family members and taken them. Psychopaths might have been quite capable of that. I told your mother witnessing that traumatized her so much, she misremembered it to protect the inner belief we quite naturally have, as a social species, our fellow humans could never hurt us so callously or maliciously like that. It was natural she would protect her psyche by misremembering the perpetrators as something more exotic, more bizarre, especially if they had been attempting to present themselves that way in the first place."

"She felt better believing that she wasn't at the mercy of a race of aliens, who used her as their lab rat. I teased her she was the most beautiful lab rat there ever was if it was all true. She gave a warm laugh at that, and I fell even more in love with her."

"We made sure her case was transferred over to another doctor, so we could date. It was less than a year after that we were engaged. Less than a year after that we were married. Less than a year after that we had you, April."

"Then she began backsliding back into her delusions. As soon as she found out she was pregnant, she began to panic. She had nightmares, flashbacks, believed they were coming for you. I tried to help her, got her more intense counseling again. We thought about medication. She did take pills to calm her, but finally, we went back to where she thought the last attack on her family had happened, with you. I believed facing all her fears, all at once, would be the turning point for her."

"So, we went, and at first, she was worse. But as days went by, and nothing happened, she calmed down even enjoyed herself. She said she was better. She said it was good to know it was all a lie."

"We went back every year after that. She seemed to grow even more beautiful to me as she relaxed. I couldn't believe I had a woman like her. I'd believed a great deal of my own life, due to not fulfilling all the manly stereotypes I wasn't much of a man. Yet, I one of the best women in the world was married to me. She was beautiful, cultured, gentle and now so compassionate, relaxed, and fun. Our lives were heaven, until they weren't."

I look up into my baby girl's face, crying, to tell her what I haven't been able to all these years, because I know what will happen when I do. "They did come. They were real, April. Too real. I saw them with my own eyes. Heard them with my own ears. And I had no idea what to do. She, your mother, told me to go out the window with you. She had been nervous that day, I thought she was slipping back into her delusions. Then I thought it was a nightmare, I actually ran into a tree on purpose to wake myself up. It only made holding you harder as we ran through the woods. When we got tired, or rather, 'I' got tired. Your mother told me we should go back to the car. We'd try to outrun them in it."

"We knew those woods from all our summers there. But we passed too close to some Kraang on our way back. They saw and chased us."

My throat constricts and eyes burn, but I force myself to go on now I've finally started. "I was so tired and just like a mantra, I told myself over and over again, to get to the car, get to the car, run, run, breathe, don't drop you, don't drop my daughter, keep carrying her, get there now!' And then I got there, buckled you in, got in the front seat, and drove, and I … I left your mother behind."

I raised my head. Then I stared into my baby girl's shocked, blue eyes. "I didn't mean to, April … I didn't mean to … I wasn't thinking straight only about you … When you're in that state of shock, state of panic, state of exhaustion, you narrow all your thoughts down to simple goals! And, I thought, your mother could keep up with me, with us … She was faster than me! I didn't even see it happen, but … She didn't make it to the car."

And now, what I'd been fearing all my life happens. In that little bunker, underground, among those people who've saved us, who won't show us what they look like, my baby girl screams at me. "How could you?! My mom! You left my mom! You left her to be captured by them! What are they doing to her?! Have they killed her?! How could you?!"

And then, she turns her back on me. She curls up in the fetal position and begins rocking. She's crying, sobbing really.

"April," I say getting up and taking a step toward her. I place a hand on her shoulder, and she jerks away. She takes a deep breath and in a shuddering breath says, "Don't touch me!"

I back away. I feel the stares on me. These three who brought us down here are witnessing all of this. I guess they deserve to after rescuing us. Their father is also doing what I cannot rescue his wife.

After all my life being a "weenie," a disappointment to all those who ever watched me wanting me to succeed at manly things like sports and fishing, after all the years in school trying to grow beyond that, after all the following years trying to help people and being proud of myself for that, after my marriage to the most wonderful woman in the world, I'm right back where I started. I am a shrink who cannot heal himself or the person closest to me. I couldn't save the one closest to me before her, who loved and trusted me. I let them both down. I betrayed them. I could not save them … and I'm going to lose April one way or another. Either she will disappear like my wife or walk away as I deserve. What else can go wrong?

What do you think?

God Bless

ScribeofHeroes